Nightmare scenario if China tries to live the American Dream

Emphasising access versus ownership isn’t just more sustainable, it helps ease friction from the differences between rich and poor. Indeed, Juccce translates Chinese Dream as “Harmonious and Happy Dream” in Mandarin. (“Green” doesn’t sell in China.)

The Chinese are more open to this than ever. A decade ago, the prevailing attitude was, “Hey, you Americans got to grow dirty for 150 years. Now it is our turn.” A couple of weeks ago, though, I took part in the opening day of Tongji University’s Urban Planning and Design Institute in Shanghai and asked students whether they still felt that way. I got a very different answer. Zhou Lin, a graduate student studying energy systems, declared, with classmates nodding: “You can politicise this issue as much as you want, but, in the end, it doesn’t do us any good.” It is not about fairness anymore, he said. It is in China’s best interest to find a “cleaner” growth path.

To say China needs its own dream in no way excuses Americans or Europeans from redefining theirs. We all need to be rethinking how we sustain rising middle classes with rising incomes in a warming world, otherwise the convergence of warming, consuming and crowding will mean we grow ourselves to death.

China’s latest five-year plan – 2011-15 – has set impressive sustainability goals for cutting energy and water intensity per unit of GDP. All of these goals are critical to the greening of China, but they are not sufficient, argues Liu. With retail sales growing 17 per cent a year since 2005 and urban incomes up 150 per cent in the last decade, “the government must also have a plan to steer consumer behaviour toward a sustainable path,” adds Liu. “But it doesn’t yet.”

So Xi Jinping has two very different challenges from his predecessor. He needs to ensure that the Communist Party continues to rule – despite awakened citizen pressure for reform – and that requires more high growth to keep the population satisfied with party control. But he also needs to manage all the downsides of that growth – from widening income gaps to massive rural-urban migration to choking pollution and environmental destruction.

The only way to square all that is with a new Chinese Dream that marries people’s expectations of prosperity with a more sustainable China. Does Xi know that, and, if he does, can he move the system fast enough? So much is riding on the answers to those questions. – (New York Times)